For all of you who still use cash for everyday use do you look and or have you found some silver coins? I used to use mostly cash until about 4-5 years ago. Now I use a CC for most everything. The other day I made a $1+ purchase and wound up with a 1963 quarter. That beats 2% cash back anyday, melt value is about $5 today.

It may be time to go back to cash, stop the fuel pump at $20.05:) every day will be a treasure hunt

The following is what I would expect to find at your local store that maybe worth more than face value:

From 1837 through 1964 the silver percentage was 90% for silver dollars, halves, quarters, dimes.

From 1965 through 1970 half dollars and silver (Eisenhower) dollars were made with a core of 21% silver, clad with an outer layer made from 80% silver.

Jay69 wrote:For all of you who still use cash for everyday use do you look and or have you found some silver coins? I used to use mostly cash until about 4-5 years ago. Now I use a CC for most everything. The other day I made a $1+ purchase and wound up with a 1963 quarter. That beats 2% cash back anyday, melt value is about $5 today.

It may be time to go back to cash, stop the fuel pump at $20.05:) every day will be a treasure hunt

The following is what I would expect to find at your local store that maybe worth more than face value:

From 1837 through 1964 the silver percentage was 90% for silver dollars, halves, quarters, dimes.

From 1965 through 1970 half dollars and silver (Eisenhower) dollars were made with a core of 21% silver, clad with an outer layer made from 80% silver.

When I was a kid, my dad got me into coin collections, and we used to go to the change machine in the mall with a bunch of ones, and a book with coin appraisal values. We'd put in a $1 bill, check for older years or special mint marks, and then cash down the quarters, dimes, etc that weren't valuable in case we'd get a good penny out of it. No idea how much, if anything, we ever made, we'd just put the coins into coin-collector books - it was more of the fun of the scavenger hunt than anything.

I make few cash purchases (actually, I make few purchases of any kind) but I look at every single coin that crosses my palm. Can't remember the last time I found any silver. It's been years.

Now the guy who runs our workplace cafeteria does about $1500 cash sales each workday, and he always shows me if he gets any silver. I'd say he averages 2-3 coins a month. So it's still out there but pretty scarce.

I've heard of people exchanging money for rolls of quarters to find silver, then return the quarters to another bank (so as not to overload one bank with quarters). They seem to find enough to keep them happy.

The last year they made 90% silver coins was 1964. I had a grocery store, and every time we received a pre-1964 coin we would throw it in a cigar box. I should have sold them for around $50.00 per troy oz. when Bunker Hunt tried to corner the silver market in 1980. Alas, I still have them. It's very hard to find them in circulation now.

Back in the day I bagged a lot of silver, which I still have, working the late night shift at 7-11. Mostly spent to buy cigarettes. Nicotine fits before there were auto tellers and debit cards were great for my collection.

Gold and silver jewelry is a lot easier to find now than silver coins. I find it at estate sales, flea markets and auctions. I just bought a lot of jewelry at auction for $15.00. There were about 20 pieces of jewelry in it, two pieces were 14K gold and one sterling silver worth about $85.00 melt value. This is my hobby. Most of the 90% silver coins I get now I buy from people. I usually pay around 10 times face value.

linuxuser wrote:I may have a few of the silver coins around. How do I go about turning them into $?

You can sell them on eBay or you can sell them to a refinery like Midwest Refineries 1-800-356-2955 http://www.midwestrefineries.com/ I sell most of my scrap jewelry to Midwest and most of my coins I sell on eBay. You should be able to get about 20 times face right now.

Last edited by Abe on Tue Jan 29, 2013 3:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

linuxuser wrote:I may have a few of the silver coins around. How do I go about turning them into $?

Find two or three local coin dealers. Call them up and ask how much they pay for US silver bullion coins. It will likely be spot price minus 3-5%. Pick the best one. Last year I got minus 3%. Depending on how much you have it may or may not be worth the trouble to drive to the dealer and back!

That's for the "pocket change" type coins. If you have silver dollars or very early coins they might have collectable value and the dealer would need to look at them to determine condition. You will get a lot less than "retail" prices for them.

I just went through this with my mother's estate. She had some very old silver dollars and half dollars. The oldest was 1884. Surprisingly, the silver value exceeded the collectible value in every instance. People have had a tendency to hoard these since the 1930s depression when the govt confiscated gold and stopped making silver dollars. When I was a kid in 50s I remember seeing an occasional silver dollar and half dollar. Even then, silver dollars were rare, half dollars less so. There are still valuable old coins, but so many people collect them that it seems like a futile effort to me unless you are a collector.

I've seen a few silver quarters in the area where I work.But the best find was a silver half in change at a local taco shop about two months ago. When the kid behind the counter saw me looking at it he told me that "Its ok, it's real. There used to be lots of them around". I thanked him for letting me know.

I had a 1937 buffalo nickel grade good-very good in my change last week. I have a bag of silver, I was buying silver dollars from the 1880's-1923 from a high school friend for a $1.25, back in the sixties his dad owned a bar in Baltimore that had slots, early in the century. . Here is a tear jerker, I worked in the box office of a summer stock theater in 1972. An old guy came in to buy 2 tickets to a show, with all Morgan silver dollars. I asked him why he was spending them, and he told me they were a present for his wife's like 80th birthday, and this was all the money he had. I upgrades him to the front row and pocketed the silver, Oh well.

tomd37 wrote:1943 Zinc Coated Lincoln Cent piece - Are they worth much? I have a bag of about 350 of them. Don't know how many of the different mint sites at this time.

I don't think they are worth much. A 1943 zinc-coated steel Lincoln penny is worth less than 10 cents today. But a 1943 one-of-a-kind copper alloy Lincoln penny struck at the Denver Mint was recently sold by a New Jersey coin dealer for a record $1.7 million.

Jay69 wrote:For all of you who still use cash for everyday use do you look and or have you found some silver coins? I used to use mostly cash until about 4-5 years ago. Now I use a CC for most everything. The other day I made a $1+ purchase and wound up with a 1963 quarter. That beats 2% cash back anyday, melt value is about $5 today.

Very timely. I just changed a bunch of coins in a machine and a quarter kept spitting out. I finally took a closer look and it was a 1964 silver quarter.

JT

Last edited by bottlecap on Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Grasshopper wrote:I had a 1937 buffalo nickel grade good-very good in my change last week. I have a bag of silver, I was buying silver dollars from the 1880's-1923 from a high school friend for a $1.25, back in the sixties his dad owned a bar in Baltimore that had slots, early in the century. . Here is a tear jerker, I worked in the box office of a summer stock theater in 1972. An old guy came in to buy 2 tickets to a show, with all Morgan silver dollars. I asked him why he was spending them, and he told me they were a present for his wife's like 80th birthday, and this was all the money he had. I upgrades him to the front row and pocketed the silver, Oh well.

And don't forget war nickels. Nickel was needed for the war effort during WW II and the gov't replaced most of the nickel in nickels with silver from 1942-1945. Think 1942 has both types but you can tell by the MintMark which is which, as I recall. Can't rememberl the exact figure but think they're worth $1 each for melt (depending on price of Silver)

I spent a short time coin roll hunting. In $300 of dimes, $300 of quarters and $150 in nickels, I found four silver dimes. It is certainly not profitable but it is a lot of fun! It feels like hunting for treasure. I have never found anything in my change, but I am young and don't use cash much.

I also found an 1862 Belgian 10-centimes coin in a nickel roll! It was in poor condition and not worth anything, but very exciting!

Dogs wrote:I spent a short time coin roll hunting. In $300 of dimes, $300 of quarters and $150 in nickels, I found four silver dimes. It is certainly not profitable but it is a lot of fun! It feels like hunting for treasure. I have never found anything in my change, but I am young and don't use cash much.

I also found an 1862 Belgian 10-centimes coin in a nickel roll! It was in poor condition and not worth anything, but very exciting!

I have to ask, you just went to your local bank and exchanged for rolls of coins? I'm thinking a bank is going to come up with a fee for something like this.

My wife is working as a waitress while she finishes school so she goes through a couple hundred bucks worth of change every month. Sorry to say it but those rotten customers haven't given her a single piece of silver. Even worse, they refuse to accept fifty cent pieces as change so I can't use her to launder all the ones I pick up from the bank!

Grasshopper wrote:I had a 1937 buffalo nickel grade good-very good in my change last week. I have a bag of silver, I was buying silver dollars from the 1880's-1923 from a high school friend for a $1.25, back in the sixties his dad owned a bar in Baltimore that had slots, early in the century. . Here is a tear jerker, I worked in the box office of a summer stock theater in 1972. An old guy came in to buy 2 tickets to a show, with all Morgan silver dollars. I asked him why he was spending them, and he told me they were a present for his wife's like 80th birthday, and this was all the money he had. I upgrades him to the front row and pocketed the silver, Oh well.

Jay69 wrote:I have to ask, you just went to your local bank and exchanged for rolls of coins? I'm thinking a bank is going to come up with a fee for something like this.

Getting rolls of coins from the bank is usually easy and free. Re-depositing them can be tricky. If you use your own bank, you might end up getting your own coins back over and over (not to mention the tellers would end up hating you). If you use another bank, you generally either have to open an account or pay a fee.

In my case, the big grocery chain where I live allows you to use the Coinstar for free if you get a gift certificate instead of cash!

More dedicated coin roll hunter might even open multiple bank accounts so they can go through huge sums of coin very quickly, depositing them over multiple banks and transferring it back to their main account. It sounds stupid but treasure hunting is exhilarating!